Wired2Fire Diablo VX-6

The Wired2Fire Diablo VX-6 is a relatively compact, no-nonsense gaming PC. It comes in a plain Cooler Master Elite 342 case, which has one intake fan installed behind the front grille, and there’s room for two more 120mm fans at the rear and on the side, too. Internally, the cables are routed fairly neatly and are held firmly in place by some thick cable ties which will take some effort to remove should you want to modify this system in the future.

Despite its small stature, the case is actually much roomier on the inside than you’d expect. This means that there’s plenty of room for the large graphics card, numerous spaces for extra storage and the large Cooler Master heatsink and fan required to keep the overclocked processor running efficiently. There are two USB ports on the front of the case, although disappointingly neither of them is USB3. There are at least four USB3 ports on the back, in addition to two USB2 connectors and six 3.5mm audio jacks.

The Intel Core i5-4690K is a Haswell-generation, quad-core processor. The K suffix on the processor model name means it’s an unlocked processor ripe for overclocking. Wired2Fire has duly done so, taking the base Turbo Boost clock speed from 3.9GHz to 4.4GHz, and the base clock speed of 3.5GHz remains unchanged. The PC recorded some great scores in all of our tests. In the image rendering, video encoding and multitasking tests it scored 132, 119 and 140 respectively, giving it a very competitive overall score of 131. This is a great performance, and means the PC is well suited to complex multimedia tasks and will easily handle all the web browsing, video watching and document editing you can throw at it.

Despite its powerful innards, the Diablo VX-6 is fairly quiet. The case isn’t particularly well insulated, which means there is an audible whir, which slightly increases when the graphics card is under load, but it’s not at all distracting.

Like the £700 Chillblast Fusion Obelisk, this PC has an AMD Radeon R7 265 graphics card. It’s a good mid-range chip, able to handle most of today’s games at high settings, and we’d expect it to be able to do so for a few years to come. In our Dirt Showdown benchmark, with graphics set to Ultra and the game running at 1,920×1,080 resolution with 4x anti aliasing, the PC was able to produce a silky smooth 66.9fps. Crysis 3, meanwhile, was able to achieve 36.7fps. At points it dropped below 30fps, but it was certainly playable for the vast majority of the time. To ensure consistent performance dropping the anti-aliasing settings would be a sure fire way to gain a few vital frames per second.

Wired2Fire hasn’t skimped on storage, either, including a 120GB Kingston SSD and a 1TB Seagate mechanical hard disk. This is a good balance of performance and capacity, and you can install your most-used applications to the SSD for a performance boost.

The Diablo VX-6 uses an Asus Vanguard B85 motherboard, which has plenty of scope for future expansion. Three of the high-speed SATA3 slots have been used by the two hard disks and the DVD writer, but there’s another SATA3 connector and two slower SATA2 ports for any extra components you may wish to add later. Two of the four RAM slots are also free for future expansion.

There’s not much room for extra PCI-E cards: the single PCI-E x1 slot is obstructed by the graphics card, which itself uses the single PCI-E x16 slot. There’s a second PCI-E x16 slot running at 4x speed just below it. While it’s accessible, we’d advise against occupying it with another component because this would block the graphics card’s fan. Right at the bottom of the case is a legacy PCI slot, which is free.

The 24in AOC E2470SW monitor supplied with the PC is very disappointing, and lets this system down. In our tests, it was only able to display 79.1 per cent of the sRGB gamut, which translates to very poor colour reproduction. The net effect of this, combined with the TN panel’s poor viewing angles, is a very so-so viewing experience with bright colours in particular lacking vibrancy. We were also disappointed with the Octigen keyboard and mouse. The keyboard in particular is incredibly spongy, making for an unpleasant typing experience. These are peripherals to avoid.

There’s no doubt that the Wired2Fire Diablo VX-6 is a powerful gaming PC with excellent internal specifications. It’s just a shame that it’s let down by a very poor display and cheap ‘n’ nasty peripherals. At this price, the Chillblast Fusion Obelisk is the better choice.